While I did like the first part of the talk, I was a bit disappointed with generalisation towards the end. While it would be great if matters of state and society could be simply expressed, and I am not saying they can’t be simplified or that doing this is bad, it’s often simply not possible, since these things aren’t designed or axiomatically derived. I tend to see this attitude quite frequently among engineering and programming circles, to dismiss the actual complexity of society, and for examine say “e-democracy will fix it” (one I personally find particularly distasteful).

The same point can be brought up with physics, where it’s even more obvious that a language “made” to communicate between everyday people about everyday activities and ideas, won’t be fit to describe the true nature of a universe so foreign to our everyday experience.

Thus, as people who work with computers, we shouldn’t want to reject at worst, constantly reduce everything to fit it into a program at best, but accept, understand and help where possible with these real complexities of the world

Less-code/faster/correct/durable are real metrics: they’re extremely well-defined and have very good business value.

But who here can’t see value in”readability” and “safety”? These are less well-defined, and at best, a function of how crap (average/most) programmers are at their job. They’re absolutely social, but they’re not a good way to value our work and ourselves since as more programmers become programmers, the mean (average) programmer simply gets worse.

Physics doesn’t have this problem, because the number of people who can tell the universe what to do, is much less than the number of people who can tell a computer what to do.